What is social networking ?
1.
Web 2.0 - The Web as Participation/Internet Democracy
"Web 2.0 refers to web development and web design that facilitates interactive information sharing, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web.
Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs.
A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them."

About social networking :
PC Magazine defines a Social Network as:
"An association of people drawn together by family, work or hobby. The term was first coined by professor J. A. Barnes in the 1950s, who defined the size of a social network as a group of about 100 to 150 people."
And defines a Social Networking Site as:
"A Web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or just to 'hang out' together.
Members create their own online "profile" with biographical data, pictures, likes, dislikes and any other information they choose to post.The 'social networking site' is the 21st century 'virtual community,' a group of people who use the Internet to communicate with each other about anything and everything.

In the Beginning:
Introduced in 2002, Friendster (www.friendster.com) was the first social site, followed by MySpace (www.myspace.com) a year later.
Started by two friends, MySpace became extremely popular, and its parent company, was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million two years after MySpace was launched. Facebook (www.facebook.com) came out in 2004 initially targeting college students, but later welcoming everyone .

Social networking statistics :
By 2011 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers,96% of them have joined a social network
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years).Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months . iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees is 80%

80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices . People update anywhere, anytime .
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles.
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
54% is the Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.

Advantages of social networking :
Create and maintain many relationships
Information comes to you
Provides ability to participate and contribute
Professional networking
Promote issues important to you
Disadvantages of social networking :
Lack of anonymity
Scams
Time consuming
Predatory targeting
Harassment and online bullying

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust.
Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook widely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America.
Facebook - www.facebook.com
MySpace - www.myspace.com
LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com
Connecting : Facebook , MySpace , Linkedin
2.

FACEBOOK
Launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm room. Facebook was originally intended to connect university students but quickly spread throughout the confines of campuses and now is the world's largest social networking site.
According to its website:
"Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet."

General Growth
More than 250 million active users
More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
User Engagement
Average user has 120 friends on the site.
More than 5 billion minutes are spent on
Facebook each day (worldwide).
More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day.
Applications
More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month (making it the largest photo-sharing service)
More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
Facebook statistics :

MySpace
According to its website:
"MySpace is a technology company connecting people through personal expression, content, and culture.
MySpace empowers its global community to experience the Internet through a social lens by integrating personal profiles, photos, videos, mobile, messaging, games, and the world’s largest music community.
MySpace is a division of News Corporation.“
Overview
Launched in January 2004
MySpace has nearly 130 million monthly active users around the globe
MySpace has more than 70 million total unique users in the US

LinkedIn - a site for creating professional relationships
According to the LinkedIn website:
"Your professional network of trusted contacts gives you an advantage in your career, and is one of your most valuable assets.
LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network and help the people you trust in return. Our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.
About linked in
LinkedIn has over 45 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world.
A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of our members are outside the U.S.

3.
Video sharing – YOU TUBE
Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the world's most popular online video community, allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos.
YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe.
YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and e-mail.
As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to share their experiences, talents, and expertise with the world.
YouTube - www.youtube.com

Flickr - Online-Photo-sharing
Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.
In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository.
According to the Flickr website, the site has two main goals:
To help people make their content available to the people who matter to them.
To enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
4.
Photo sharing - FLICKR

5.
Social bookmarking –del.icio.us
del.icio.us - www.delicious.com
What is social bookmarking?
"Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
What is Delicious?
Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source.
Things you can do with Delicious
Bookmark any site on the Internet, and get to it from anywhere
Share your bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return.

6.
Wikis (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
Its 18 million articles (over 3.5 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.
Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.
The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
WIKIPEDIA